After a good year of public existence, KPovModeler 0.2 is released.
KPovModeler is a full-featured graphical modeler and composer for creating POV-Ray(TM) scenes under KDE 3. It now supports almost the full gamut of POV-Ray 3.1 functionality -- see these nice screenshots. KPovModeler is a new member of the KDE Graphics package, but we are still looking for a documentation writer to join the project.

Current features are:

Hierarchical object tree

Non-blocking scene rendering with OpenGL

Object modification with control points in a graphical view
or direct manipulation of object attributes in a dialog

Free configurable view layout with dock widgets

Prototypes (declarations) and references

Copy/paste and drag/drop of (a subset of) povray(!) code into
and out of the object tree

Undo and redo

Scene rendering and texture preview with povray inside the program

Support for almost all povray objects

Support for all textures

All projection modes of the camera

What is still missing is user documentation. We lack the
time to write it ourselves, so we would like someone to take
over this task. If you are interested sendme a mail. Basic POV-Ray knowledge would be an asset.

The big shops still use OpenInventor and in conjunction with scripting languages (on SGIs and Suns, I might add). GUIs are great and all, but perhaps they should be geared towards extending the lead of complex packages instead of trying to make less complex apps even simpler. If graphics guys want Linux to go in this direction, it will help everyone in the graphics business. But if Linux keeps going the route it is, it might remain just an alternative to the ever-popular Windows - just a hack-tool for the masses, although only a small percentage of those masses. Isn't it time to change this?

I agree with you in the sense that it would be a pity if, after all the efforts done by the open-source movements, GNU/Linux systems remains just as a free alternative to Microsoft's Trust Softwares.

But, never forget that this little difference is, for at least a half
of them, the reason that makes people use Linux.

The sole and unique question to think of is : "Will the open-source community wait for proprietary high quality multimedia softwares to be ported to Linux before hacking better ones ?"

By this I mean that it is not good for GNU/Linux not to develop some kinds of professional multimedia studios. Just think of an open-source software which allows you to product digital videos from scratch.

Not sure why you feel that Povray sucks. It seems to be a very good ray tracer and its radiosity engine has improved greatly in recent months (with the the version 3.5 release candidates). You might argue that the scripting language native to Povray is not as intuitive as, say, a 3D modeller, but if you look at Renderman, the standard used by Pixar for their movies and shorts, it is also based on a scripting language.

If you would like to see the quality that Povray can achieve, I suggest that you look at the following images posted to the Povray news groups (news.povray.org):

The problem about all that is that it's hard to animate stuff. Most renderers are based on polygonal models I guess. While in theory, a procedural model is superior because of better scalability, it's hardly possible to animate this. You can use polygons for povray, but you'll lose a lot of "cool" stuff. However, for still images, povray is a very nice renderer.

Yes, animating something in povray can be quite difficult, but an animation is just a sequence of still images. The idea behind this modeller is precisely to hide the complexities of a procedural renderer from the end user.

If you create the scene using object declarations and links, you can create an animation of sorts.
1. Create the scenery. This is a fixed collection of objects that won't move during the animation.
2. Then create the animatable objects. You can then place them (using links) on the scene.
3. Render the scene.
4. Change the name of the generated png to include the frame number.
5. Change the translation/rotation of the objects a bit.
6. While you don't have all the pictures, go to 3

You just have to use an application to join all pictures in a movie and it's done. No application name occurs to me but there are several out there.

Anyway, animation is one of the features we intend to add to kpovmodeler later on. We have no clear view on how this will be implemented and we're always open to suggestions on how to do it.

I remember POV Ray from when I was back on Windows. I quite liked it, but compared to commercial raytracers it had a BIG problem with speed. Is this still the case? I last tried it many years ago, but it could take forever to render a moderately big scene, whereas for instance LightWave would do it in only a few minutes. By the way, KPovModeler looks really nice, when I've got kde3 i'll definately try it again, and I might be able to do some doc writing for you. No promises however.

There are already a lot of 3d modellers available for KDE and GNOME and they are all the same. None of the ones I've seen have support for animation. What I'd like to see is something capable of modelling motion, such as water droplets, a bouncing ball, creatures that walk, etc. I'd also like to see a modelling program that reads stereoscopic images/video and develops a model in 3D space. Maybe these ideas might spur some innovation. :)

This program looks excellent, and was looking forward to trying it out. Un fortunatly when I started it up the only tool bar I had was the one with open, save, and print on it. The screenshots show loads of others so where are they? Couldn't edit or render the example scenes as a result. Maybe it's just me being stupid or lack of documentation but any ideas?

This program looks excellent, and was looking forward to trying it out. Un fortunatly when I started it up the only tool bar I had was the one with open, save, and print on it. The screenshots show loads of others so where are they? Couldn't edit or render the example scenes as a result. Maybe it's just me being stupid or lack of documentation but any ideas?

How about a standardformat for creating 3d-models and other graphics?
It seems that there are already many programs for this, and both have their strong and weak points. If all these programs used the same open-standardformat it would be very easy to work with. We could also perfectly bennefit from all the stong points of the different programs.

Conclusion: its not a matter about wich program we use, but wich format the programs use.

I'd have to second BMRT and of course that should automatically include Renderman. I would like to see some comparisons between the speed and qualities of the various renderers especially the free ones.

Yes, apparently too well. You see when someone writes (says) something like "most (all) other (OSS) renderers...", I tend to think they are qualifying the 'other renders' to mean 'other OSS renderers'. Sorry.